Auditory Illusions

Kung fu movies on VHS were a rare delight for my friends and me during the late 80s. We enjoyed them not because of their cinematic brilliance, but instead because the translation was particularly bad.

Now, this wasn’t the only reason to watch a third rate kung fu film! There was plenty of martial arts action, but the plot lines tended to be quickly put together and full of easily spotted inconsistencies.

If you’ve ever seen voice dubs like these, you’ve probably experienced The McGurk Effect a few times. This is when a mouth moves around and makes a particular shape, but the sound coming out of the TV is something really different—something that particular shape of mouth could not make.

Sometimes, your brain sort of auto-corrects this.

You hear a word that the person simply did not say, because your brain is trying to make sense of the conflicting accounts from your eyes and ears. In this case, it sides with your eyes and overrides the information coming in from your ears.

Or, as wit…